Musk was angry with how the production of the Model S turned out. He fired multiple employees and exerted even more of a watchful eye over the production of the car. Isaacson mentions that “one of Musk’s favorite words—and concepts—was ‘hardcore’” (220), and he created a hardcore environment at every company he headed. Isaacson believes that Musk was vindicated when the Model S was released in 2012 and well-received by car critics.

In 2013, Musk decided to build a huge battery factory in Nevada, the Gigafactory, to simplify Tesla’s supply chain. They convinced Panasonic to finance a significant portion of the factory.

Isaacson portrays Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, as a fellow space enthusiast who became a competitor to Musk. Both men had a vision to build reusable rockets. Bezos and his company, Blue Origin, applied for a US patent that described methods of landing a rocket at sea. SpaceX sued, claiming that this idea was not original, and Bezos canceled the patent.

SpaceX developed a Falcon 9 prototype called Grasshopper which could hop up to 3,000 feet and down again. On June 28, 2015, Musk’s 44th birthday, a Falcon 9 exploded, the first time that this model of rocket had failed.